James Comey Blames His Own Wife After He Posted Threatening Anti-Trump Post
Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey is attempting to shift the blame to President Donald Trump after he was interviewed by the Secret Service for what some perceived to be a threat against the commander-in-chief.
He made his case after several federal agencies began investigating him for his Instagram post that showed a seashell formation in the shape of numbers 8647, which he admitted was a political message.
Many presumed that ’86’ was used in its traditional sense to say “get rid of” and 47 was representative of the 47th president, Donald Trump, who fired Comey early in his first term for malfeasance.
“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Comey said in the post that has since been deleted, before he posted a follow-up in which he tried to explain it away.
“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” he said. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
The former FBI director spoke to MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace on Monday, where he said his only regret about posting the image was the “distraction” it caused.
“Did you have any regret about posting the picture?” the anchor said.
“Well I regret the distraction and the controversy around it. But again, it’s hard to have regret about something that even in hindsight looks to me to be totally innocent for the reasons you said,” the former FBI director said. “But yeah, I didn’t have a gut check. In the Trump-era, I’ve been investigated a lot, audited a lot, and so it’s not my first rodeo. In some strange way, [Trump] can’t get over, maybe because I’ve lived a happy, productive life since leaving. But this has just been a distraction of that life.”
Nicolle Wallace: "You are back in the middle of a political firestorm."
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 19, 2025
James Comey: "Yeah, for walking on the beach with my wife." pic.twitter.com/WkmcDdEz8I
But in what can only be described as cowardly, Comey did not stop at blaming President Trump.
He shifted the blame to his own wife, who, he said, found the shell formation and instructed him to take a photo of it and post it online.
“We stood over it and I said ‘you know, I think it’s some sort of political message,’” he said.
“And she said, ‘you know 86, when I was a server,’ she did a lot of work in restaurants, meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients. And I said, ‘well, to me, as a kid it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place.’ I said ‘that’s really clever.’ And she said ‘you should take a picture of that.’ So I did, and I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it until I heard through her that people were saying it was some sort of call for assassination which is crazy. But I took it down,” he said.
He also had harsh words for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who said, during an appearance on Fox News, that the former FBI director should be arrested for what she said was a threat against the president.
“It says something more depressing about the leadership of our current administration. And I just shrug because that’s ridiculous,” he said.
The White House responded to Comey’s blame parade in a message to The Daily Caller after the interview.
“Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey, whom President Trump fired for gross incompetence and unfitness for the role, suffers from an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields said to The Caller.
“His recent doubling down on incomprehensible and dangerous rhetoric directed at President Trump underscores his derangement and commitment to divisiveness and politics rather than loyalty to the country. The appropriate federal agencies are investigating his inexcusable actions and will take prompt action if warranted,” he said.
